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In regards to getting gapless playback with mplayer...

If a named pipe is used to stream the audio, linux does enough buffering to achieve gapless playback. Just set up aplay to read from a pipe and use mplayer to send raw pcm to the pipe.

Code Select Expand

$ mkfifo audiofifo
$ aplay -t raw -c 2 -f S16_LE -r 44100 audiofifo &
$ mplayer -ao pcm:nowaveheader:file=audiofifo <audio files>

Ideas taken from http://www.volkerschatz.com/hardware/itxplayer.html (scroll down to software/audio player)

Craving some gapless goodness I decided to try 1.1.4 with gstreamer. Previously I was using 1.0.2 with mplayer and didn't even have gstreamer installed on my system. After installing gstreamer and flac, mp3 and ogg support (tested to work with aplay and gst-launch) I started 1.1.4 with the gapless box checked and all is well... except it seems to randomly lose the connection to gstreamer. Sometimes its after sitting idle for a while or after one album plays through and I start another one, sometimes just randomly. The progress bar stays at zero and nothing happens when I try and start a song. Restarting gmb fixes this, as does changing to the mplayer backend instead without restarting, though switching back to gstreamer only works with restart. I'm not sure if the issue is my new gstreamer setup or with alpha gmb, but I figured I could provide useful feedback either way.